University of Toronto Shootout 2014
September 27, 2014
With September comes both a start to the new school year, and the last opportunity to take the RR14 out for competition. Typically held between late-September and mid-October, the University of Toronto Shootout is a one day autocross event that is organized by the Formula SAE team from (you guessed it) The University of Toronto (U of T).
For one day the U of T rents out the go karting track at the Canadian Tire Motorsports Park (formerly Mosport) in Bowmanville, Ontario. Teams from near and far come to the track for one day of pure driving fun.
We arrive at the track on Friday night before the competition and set-up a small tent city right beside the pit / timing area. Soon other teams arrive and the fun can begin. We have of course brought food, firewood, and stories of our year with the RR14. We’ve also had a little bit of fun with our car, dressing it up for the event.
Being the last competition of the year, the U of T Shootout is the final time that all of these cars will be able to run in a formal competition. The SAE rules specify that cars are only valid for one year of competition from the first day they are registered at an event. This little detail makes the U of T Shootout a lot more relaxed than many other competitions.
As the fire burns through the night we get to talking to many other teams about what they’ve spent the year working on, and what we all plan on doing to improve our performance in the upcoming year. We all know that each team has secrets about their new cars designs, and we’re not about to give ours away either, but the atmosphere is friendly and we all get a laugh out of sharing stories of our best design elements from the last year…… and our best mistakes and breakages. Blown turbochargers, broken suspension, faulty engine maps, clutch troubles, or in our case broken engine mounts, everyone comes clean.
The U of T shootout is just an autocross event, no design component to the scoring, no efficiency score, no cost analysis, and no marketing presentation. The only thing that matters here is your time around the track. We swapped over to a new set of tires during lunch, and cut more than a second off our lap times with the new rubber. Here Eugene is working on fixing a leaky wheel mid-morning, sealant can be tricky stuff.
The course in Bowmanville provides an interesting challenge too……. A hill. All the rest of our competition venues are flat racetracks, parking lots or airfields, so the incline here on the karting track is something of an obstacle for some cars.
Some cars such as the all-electric entry from McGill University struggle to get up the hill under power, while other entries like the car from Oakland University manage to use all the grunt from their CBR 600 engine to fly up the gradient. The hill gives our tiny engine a challenge, but we pull through every time.
The University of Akron in Ohio leaves the day with the quickest time around the track, running with a 450cc Yamaha single cylinder, they seem to have found a good balance of power for their car.
We place 14th out of 17 teams. Not the fastest of the day but still in the pack. Most notably we beat out both The University of Guelph, and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which were using engines with nearly three times as large as ours. Clearly displacement isn’t everything when it comes to racecars.
Thanks to the University of Toronto for organizing such a fun event year after year. We can’t wait to come back with the RR15 next year.
